The Power of Stories in Personality Psychology

I’ve always loved this quote in part because I’m a sucker for stories. (As a writer I guess that’s a prerequisite, but we’re all storytellers by nature; yes, all of us.)

Stories are how we make sense of our lives and the world and how we communicate with others.

Stories also are how we make sense of ourselves. According to researcher Dan P. McAdams in his chapter in the Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research:

…the stories we construct to make sense of our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we were, are and might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are and might be in the social contexts of family, community, the workplace, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class and culture writ large.

So essentially, the stories we tell are a window into our personalities. And many personality researchers, including McAdams, have been culling our stories for clues. A key concept, writes McAdams, in this literature is “narrative identity,” or “an individual’s internalized, evolving and integrative story of the self.”

As McAdams and Pals write in the American Psychologist:

Narrative approaches to personality suggest that human beings construe their own lives as ongoing stories and that these life stories help to shape behavior, establish identity, and integrate individuals into modern social life (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992; Josselson & Lieblich, 1993; McAdams, 1985; Singer & Salovey, 1993; Tomkins, 1987).

Six Principles of Storytelling

According to McAdams, there are many theories about life stories, which differ in various ways. But there are six common principles to the “narrative study of lives” that researchers do agree on, which he discusses in the book chapter.

1. “The self is storied”

Every culture has its own stories, and you can see evidence of this in everything from mythology to motion picture, from biography to Broadway, from novels to the news. We also start telling stories as young kids.

What’s especially important about our stories, McAdams writes, is the personal meaning we assign to them. Our memories are of course colored by our perspective, goals and so on. “Life stories, therefore, are always about both the reconstructed past and the imagined future.”

2. “Stories integrate lives”

One of the most important things that stories can do is a process called “integration,” bringing “together into an understandable frame disparate ideas, characters, happenings and other elements of life that were previously set apart.” We try to find meaning in everything from a minor event to major life experiences, which is called “autobiographical reasoning.”

McAdams writes:

Whether aimed at finding meaning in yesterday’s conversation around the water cooler or in a 15-year marriage that ended two decades ago, autobiographical reasoning is an exercise in personal integration—putting things together into a narrative pattern that affirms life meaning and purpose.

3. “Stories are told in social relationships”

Stories, of course, are not told in isolation. We tell stories to others, and so they are “social phenomena, told in accord with societal expectations and norms.” Research has shown that inattention can squash or shorten storytelling. For instance, if the listener is distracted while the speaker is telling their story, they tell shorter stories (half as long as the condition that had an attentive listener).

People also adjust their stories depending on their audience. One researcher refers to two types of storytelling: dramatic and reflective. Dramatic storytelling is just like it sounds with gesturing, vivid words and efforts to recreate the scenes. Reflective storytelling is much less about the story details and more about the meaning. The person talks about what the event meant to them or how it made them feel.

The Power of Stories in Personality Psychology

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Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.

Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. is an Associate Editor at Psych Central. She blogs regularly about body and self-image issues on her own blog, Weightless, and about creativity on her second blog Make a Mess.

APA Reference Tartakovsky, M. (2018). The Power of Stories in Personality Psychology. Psych Central.
Retrieved on March 21, 2019, from https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-power-of-stories-in-personality-psychology/

Last updated: 8 Oct 2018Last reviewed: By a member of our scientific advisory board on 8 Oct 2018Published on Psych Central.com. All rights reserved.